How do you define censorship?

[netmouse]

Someone commented in another journal the idea that censorship is something only governments can do.

I had defined it as something people with power do to people (publications, performances, etc) they have power over.

ETA: by power I meant institutionally-based authority, not merely physical force. "Institution" can include social institutions, such as clubs, churches, or families.

How do you define censorship?

Comments

[cannibal.livejournal.com]

Okay, it isn't just governments, although one might argue that The Church in the 13th century was the biggest government. Idealogical groups can do it too.

It isn't just something people with power do, an editor exercising his power to maintain his vision for a particular publication isn't censoring. John Campbell certainly taught authors to write stories according to his vision, and wouldn't buy them otherwise.

An idealogical organization certainly has the right to choose what they publish. It wouldn't be censorship for the Catholic Monthly to refuse to print "How to be a Wiccan".

On the other hand, if an organization has no part in the creation, publication, or transmission of a given work, and their only role is to limit what can be published or transmitted, that is censorship. They must needs have the power to control that publication or transmission. Groups like the Moral Majority can censor - one idiot writing a letter complaining that you shouldn't make movies where a black man has sex with a white woman is just whining, a thousand of them organized together are trying to impose effective censorship. Comstock's Society for the Suppression of Vice was not a part of the government, but they burned books and put pressure on the government to pass the Comstock Obscenity Laws.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I wasn't saying that anything people with power do (to control expression) is censorship, I was saying that censorship is something that can be done by anyone with power.

[cannibal.livejournal.com]

I sort of agree... although it may depend on their role. If an editor decides to self-censor, is he really a censor in the same way as a political commisar is?

[sethb.livejournal.com]

Deciding what you're going to say (or write, or post) isn't censorship (unless it's done due to external pressure, in which case that external pressure might be censorship).